We, the authors of this book, often think we are the luckiest people in the world. We have walked on and looked at beaches all over the world, on all seven continents. With our feet and eyes we study one of the world’s most dynamic natural environments. Best of all, the work is part of our job: We study the present as geologists in order to understand the past, and as educators to pass on our global experience to students.
At times we have walked around chunks of ice that were pushed ashore by cold Arctic winds so that they bulldozed beach sand on their way. At other times we have tramped along steaming-hot beaches in the tropics next to rain forests alive with strange noises and filled with beautiful butterflies. Some beaches were remote, tens of miles from the nearest person, while others were lined by subsistence villages full of people who mistook us for “officials” because they could fathom no other reason why we would be there. We have walked along some of the world’s great tourist beaches, crowded with sun worshippers escaping from their busy lives in well-to-do societies. Often we have appeared to be out of place, wearing long pants, long sleeves, hats, and boots among the more scantily clad beach goers; and instead of lolling on the beach or enjoying the surf, we often were wandering into the dunes or clambering over seawalls carrying our cameras and notebooks. In striking up acquaintances with the locals and tourists, we have learned much about these beaches that we might not have observed and have discovered much about people’s conceptions and misconceptions regarding beaches.
We have seen much and found many things that seem strange; these represent natural riddles to be solved, and some of the questions within the riddles remain. However, our long-term experience has given us a global perspective in regard to beaches, how they form, how they evolve, and how they are similar but different. To us it seems fortuitous, but our coming to the beaches professionally has corresponded more or less with a global rush to the shore, at least in the Western world. Suddenly our work became a bit less academic and a bit more practical and important to society. Expensive houses began to fall into the sea, and seawalls began to sprout like weeds in a garden. One of the first lessons that became apparent was that the price to be paid to protect buildings with seawalls was the eventual loss of the beach. All over the world, planners and politicians wanted to know just how beaches worked and what they could do to save them and the houses next to them.
Meanwhile, in the midst of this societal maelstrom over the “erosion problem,” we learned much about the little things that make beaches what they are. We came to know why some beach sand is soft, why some beaches sing when you walk on them, and why some beaches have dark rings on their surface and tiny holes scattered far and wide. We have lived and worked with the scientists who figured out how old (or young) beaches are and how they began and evolved.
All of us are professors, and we have brought students on field trips to beaches for many years. We have found that people are fascinated when they are asked to view a beach as something other than a strip of sand to play on. The features of beaches, large and small, and the mechanics of beaches, explained over the noise of the surf while standing on a breezy shoreline, kept the attention of even the most desultory or distracted student. The leap from those experiences to this book was a short one.
We four authors are friends of long standing who enjoy working together. Starting in 1976, William Neal and Orrin Pilkey began writing and editing coastal books over a span of twenty-seven years, resulting in the twenty-two-volume Living with the Shore series, published by Duke University Press. These state-specific books focus on the hazards of beachfront living. William Neal, an emeritus professor of geology, was a longtime faculty member of Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, just a dozen or so miles from the shore of Lake Michigan in Great Lakes country. Orrin Pilkey is a retired professor from Duke University, in North Carolina, where he founded the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines. He coauthored two early books on shoreline problems (The Beaches Are Moving and How to Live with an Island) that set the groundwork for the Living with the Shore coastal hazard series, and more recently he authored books on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the American shore, global barrier islands, the perils of mathematical modeling, and the sea-level rise. Joe Kelley authored two of the books in the coastal hazard series (Maine and Louisiana). He wrote the Louisiana book in the early part of his career, while he was a faculty member at the University of New Orleans. After moving back to his home state of Maine, Kelley was the state of Maine’s coastal geologist for years before he became a professor at the University of Maine. Currently he is the chairman of the Department of Earth Sciences. Andrew Cooper spent a decade in South Africa, living in Durban and observing the coasts of much of southern and East Africa. He eventually moved back to his home in Northern Ireland, joining the faculty at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, where he now heads the Coastal Studies Research Program. Cooper has published numerous coastal studies and has done joint research on a number of coastal issues with both Pilkey and Kelley.
Among us we have well over one hundred years of coastal geology experience. That statistic suggests that we also have spent a good deal of time away from home in our work, although we often brought our families along. Perhaps that explains why our collective marriages have endured for a total of more than 150 years, and we are now counting our grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. Sometimes the questions posed by our children (thirteen among us) brought our focus to particular beach features. We write so our children and their children can understand and enjoy the beaches as much as we have. The Earth’s future is theirs.
The first part of this book, five of the thirteen chapters, begins with a brief look at the role that beaches have played in history over thousands of years. We then turn to the science of beaches, how their study has developed, particularly during the twentieth century, leading to various classifications of coasts, shorelines, and beaches. Then we turn to the materials of beaches, and how the waves and sand interact, what happens in storms, and considerable discussion about why beaches are all different. Part II of the book, chapters 6 through 11, provides guidance in how to read a beach, how to explain what we can see on a beach, and what beach surfaces tell us about how beaches work.
Chapters 12 and 13 in Part III explore the threats that beaches face today: coastal overdevelopment, pollution, oil spills, the impacts of coastal engineering, and especially the rising sea level. For example, while we were in the final manuscript preparation in the early months of 2010, a major storm hit the west coast of France, ultimately resulting in fifteen hundred houses being condemned (and a major relocation). After that, the oil-well drilling-platform disaster in the Gulf of Mexico threatened the U.S. Gulf Coast with an oil spill that became the largest ever for the United States. The small, almost unnoticed, reports of beach mining, refuse accumulation on tourist beaches, development controversies, and the stories of the sea-level rise on beaches here and there continued to come in, daily reminders of the varied threats to beaches. There is no question that the beaches that our grandchildren will play on will be different from ours. The important question is whether they will be better or worse.
We have a large number of people to thank for helping us with the book, more than we can list here. Of course, in summarizing the nature of beaches we stand on the shoulders of a dozen prominent international scientists who preceded us. These pioneering individuals came from all over the world, including Australia, Germany, New Zealand, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Miles Hayes, longtime global beach watcher and the “king” of barrier island science, contributed some outstanding photos to our book (and discussed them at length with us). Charles Pilkey, artist son of Orrin, created the various line drawings and illustrations. Norma Longo provided essential assistance as an overall organizer, editor, file clerk, adviser, and researcher for this book. Numerous individuals provided us with photos. We extend special thanks to Angela Hessler, Joe Holmes, and Mark Luttenton for assistance in photography, and we note that the photos from northern Alaska beaches were contributed by Owen Mason, Puget Sound photos by Hugh Shipman, and Antarctica photos by Norma Longo. Siberian photos were the result of a field trip arranged by Wally Kaufman, who provided important input when this book was in its formative stage.
The manuscript was improved as a result of Duncan Fitzgerald’s careful review, for which we thank him, but any errors that might remain are those of the authors alone. We especially thank our editors, Jenny Wapner, Lynn Meinhardt, and Hannah Love, along with the University of California Press for seeing us through the production of this book. Encouragement is a driving force in any work, and there are many people and programs dedicated to protecting beaches. For this effort, we extend our gratitude to Eva and Olaf, to the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, Western Carolina University, and to the Santa Aguila Foundation. The production of this fully color-illustrated book was made possible by the Santa Aguila Foundation, and we encourage readers who are concerned about the conservation of beaches to visit both the Coastal Care and the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines Web sites.